A VPN provider can potentially log every site you visit, just like your ISP.
The actual benefits are mostly practical, being able to access streaming services and other sites from other countries.
It does hide your IP but this isn't as big a deal as you might think, and moot, if the ISP logs your activity.
It does not provide some special extra layer of encryption. It does encrypt the traffic, but most of the time, it was already encrypted anyway. The vast majority of internet traffic is.
Maybe? There are ways to limit what apps are able to access the internet. Rooting, or installing a Custom ROM may be possible on your current phone.
I won't break entirely. It'll probably mostly work, but a lot of systems in normal android phones do rely on google play services.
Definitely. FOSS apps tend to be entirely local, not phoning home unless there is good reason in the context of the functionality of the app. At the very least, they will more often than not still work, if denied internet access. This doesn't mean good commercial software doesn't exist, though.
A VPN is probably not necessary for your privacy. Using one is potentially even a privacy risk, as you then need to trust the company providing it, in addition to your ISP. Your actual internet traffic is encrypted either way, unless you visit websites that do not use HTTPS, which is extremely rare nowadays.
I don't think there's any effective difference between timeshift and snapper. They're both essentially just GUIs for features supported by the underlying btrfs filesystem.
Why would you not condone it? A 17-year-old, is a "kid" to anyone about a decade older than that, but they also don't just magically stop being "a kid" on their 18th birthday.
Most people enjoy sex, and most teenagers have an intense drive to explore it. What's wrong with that?
Tell em how to be safe, maybe throw in some guidelines on place and time, and how to not disturb others with it, and let em.
But why would you not condone it, unless one of or both of the people involved are abusive or being taken advantage of?
That the adults related to the teenagers, feel it's icky, has nothing to do with anything.
If you watch any interviews with Stubb, where he is asked about Trump, he gives answers that would please Trump.
But if you watch him talk about anything else, you can tell Stubb is way too smart to consider Trump anything other than a bumbling fool. It's incredible that he's able to clue people in, while even in person the idiot himself doesn't realize.
He's trying to walk the line of pleasing Trumps ego, while getting real work done.
He's literally just been saying stuff along the line "here's what president Trump needs to do (insert sane policy), but he's so smart he doesn't need me telling him that".
I haven't found anything that is quite like Macrium. Mostly, because something that works the same way is a bad idea on linux. Because as you suspect, an image backup cannot be done while the partition being imaged is live.
Macrium creates restorable images of your entire boot partition or disk, as-is, which can then be restored onto the same, or an entirely different, disk.
This isn't really something you can do in linux, with a system that is live. Hence, partition images should be done offline, when the given partition isn't booted.
That said, everything that matters can be backed up simply by copying the relevant files. For this, I use Kopia.
As for making sure you always have a bootable system, for this I use Timeshift on btrfs.
For MS office, you might try winapps. Sounds like what you're hoping for.
In Finland, if you ask "miten menee" (how is it going) you'll either get to hear someone's life story, or a single word reply "menee" (it's going) which amounts to "I don't want to talk about it". But the assumption is that the person asking is up to exchange a few genuine sentences.
Or, if someone is having a genuinely good day, you might get a few sentences explaining why things are looking up.
Hence, most people will go with literally neutral statements. An example, my go-to farewell is "päivänjatkoa" which is literally just "may the day continue".
Most banks will let you use your card in other currencies, directly, and just do the exchange on their end.
And it's usually really favorable too. If you've used your card abroad "like normal" for stuff like a restaurant meal, then you've used your banks currency exchange service.
It'll still add up if you make a ton of small purchases, and it would be good to check what your particular bank actually charges for exchanges.
But, lots of places will pretend to offer to do the exchange for you, at sky-high rates, when really you can just charge your card directly, and get a much better rate via your bank.
Once saved a friend like 50 bucks when she bought a leather jacket on the expensive side during a cruise. The shop offered to do the exchange for her, as if that was necessary. I saw the rate and immediately told her to refuse, knowing our bank charges almost nothing for foreign currency charges. She would have fallen for it.
A VPN provider can potentially log every site you visit, just like your ISP.
The actual benefits are mostly practical, being able to access streaming services and other sites from other countries.
It does hide your IP but this isn't as big a deal as you might think, and moot, if the ISP logs your activity.
It does not provide some special extra layer of encryption. It does encrypt the traffic, but most of the time, it was already encrypted anyway. The vast majority of internet traffic is.